This is a compelling if sober set of questions from America's foremost legal scholar."--Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University.

Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done (...) by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology. (shrink)

Three global developments situate the context of this investigation: the increasing use of social media by organizations and their employees, the burgeoning presence of social media policies, and the heightened focus on corporate social responsibility. In this study the intersection of these trends is examined through a content analysis of 112 publicly available social media policies from the largest corporations in the world. The extent to which social media policies facilitate and/or constrain the communicative sensibilities and values associated with contemporary (...) notions of CSR is considered. Overall, findings indicate that a large majority of policies, regardless of sector or national headquarters, increasingly inhibit communicative tenets of contemporary CSR and thereby diminish employee negotiation and participation in the social responsibilities of corporations. Moreover, policies generally enact organizational communication practices that are contrary to international CSR guidelines. Findings suggest that social media policies represent a relatively unrecognized development in the institutionalization of CSR communicative norms and practices that call into question the promising affordances of social media for the inclusion of various voices in the public negotiation of what constitutes corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the determinants of corporate reputation within a sample of large UK companies drawn from a diverse range of industries. We pay particular attention to the role that philanthropic expenditures and policies may play in shaping the perceptions of companies among their stakeholders. Our findings highlight that companies which make higher levels of philanthropic expenditures have better reputations and that this effect varies significantly across industries. Given that reputational indices tend to reflect the financial performance of organizations above (...) other factors (Fryxell, G. E. and J. Wang: 1994, Journal of Management 20, 1–14) and that elements of the literature emphasise that discretionary aspects of social responsibility, including corporate donations, may not be in the financial interests of organizations (e.g. Friedman, M.: 1970, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, New York Times Magazine, September 13), this is a significant finding. It suggests that philanthropic expenditures may play a significant role in stakeholder management and may, in particular, lead to stakeholders holding more positive impressions of philanthropic corporations. (shrink)

By examining existing definitions and data sets, this article explores the current state of efforts intended to measure corporate reputation. Both definitions and data are found to be lacking, and it is argued that many deficiencies in definition and data can be attributed to the fact that theory development related to corporate reputation has been insufficient.

The paper introduces the communication view on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which regards CSR as communicatively constructed in dynamic interaction processes in today’s networked societies. Building on the idea that communication constitutes organizations we discuss the potentially indeterminate, disintegrative, and conflictual character of CSR. We hereby challenge established mainstream views on CSR such as the instrumental view, which regards CSR as an organizational instrument to reach organizational aims such as improved reputation and financial performance, and the political-normative view on CSR, (...) which highlights the societal conditions and role of corporations in creating norms. We argue that both the established views, by not sufficiently acknowledging communication dynamics in networked societies, remain biased in three ways: control-biased, consistency-biased, and consensus-biased. We discuss implications of these biases and propose a future research agenda for the communication view on CSR. (shrink)

Modern society is challenged by a loss of efficiency in national governance systems values, and lifestyles. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse builds upon a conception of organizational legitimacy that does not appropriately reflect these changes. The problems arise from the a-political role of the corporation in the concepts of cognitive and pragmatic legitimacy, which are based on compliance to national law and on relatively homogeneous and stable societal expectations on the one hand and widely accepted rhetoric assuming that all members (...) of society benefit from capitalist production on the other. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to moral legitimacy, from an output and power oriented approach to an input related and discursive concept of legitimacy. This shift creates a new basis of legitimacy and involves organizations in processes of active justification vis-à-vis society rather than simply responding to the demands of powerful groups. We consider this a step towards the politicization of the corporation and attempt to re-embed the debate on corporate legitimacy into its broader context of political theory, while reflecting the recent turn from a liberal to a deliberative concept of democracy. (shrink)

This study examined the emergence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a public issue over 25 years using a content analysis of two national news- papers and seven regional, geographically-dispersed newspapers in the U.S. The present study adopted a comprehensive definition encompassing all four CSR dimensions: economic, ethical, legal, and philanthropic. This study examined newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, op-ed columns, news analyses, and guest columns for three aspects: media attention, media prominence, and media valence. Results showed an increase (...) in the number of opinion pieces covering CSR issues over the 25-year period. The prominence of each of the four CSR dimensions varied over time. Each of the four CSR dimensions had its moment of media prominence when it was more important than the other dimensions. The most prevalent valence of the opinion pieces was negative; the volume of negative pieces increased over the 25 years, whereas the number of opinions with positive, neutral, and mixed tones showed little change over time. The study concludes by tracing the implications of the role of the news media for business ethics research. (shrink)

This paper develops a media theoretical extension of the communicative view on corporate social responsibility by elaborating on the characteristics of network societies, arguing that new media increase the speed and connectivity, and lead to higher plurality and the potential polarization of reality constructions. We discuss the implications for corporate social responsibility of becoming more polyphonic and sketch the contours of “communicative legitimacy.” Finally, we present this special issue and develop some questions for future research.

Little attention has been paid to the importance of social media in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. This deficit is redressed in the present paper through utilizing the notion of ‘citizenship arenas’ to identify three dynamics in social media-augmented corporate–society relations. First, we note that social media-augmented ‘corporate arenas of citizenship’ are constructed by individual corporations in an effort to address CSR issues of specific importance thereto, and are populated by individual citizens as well as (functional/formally organized) stakeholders. Second, (...) we highlight that, within social media-augmented ‘public arenas of citizenship’, individual citizens are empowered, relative to corporations and their (functional/formally organized) stakeholders, when it comes to creating, debating, and publicizing, CSR-relevant issues. Third, we posit that information and communication technology corporations possess specific, and potentially very important, capacities, when it comes to creating, or helping construct, public arenas of citizenship from within which individual citizens can influence their broader political–economic environment. Following this, we discuss how social media can contribute to ‘dysfunctions’ as well as ‘progressions’ in corporate–society relations, and conclude with a number of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, we examined how companies are employing new media to engage in dialogue with their stakeholders about corporate social responsibility -related matters. Through a qualitative theory-building study conducted in three stages over a period of 2 years, we discovered that corporations with reputations for CSR have built virtual spaces for dialogue about CSR, but that these spaces remain empty of dialogue. Our theory-building model highlights how the mix of four dialogue processes may allow companies to create open dialogue (...) about CSR initiatives and avoid leaving these spaces empty. Contributions for CSR studies are discussed. (shrink)